Deadlock

9

There were no shadows, no strands. He was holding out his hand into the empty air. Still, he could smell them and feel them wriggling against his palm. Shivering, he brushed his hand against his shirt, trying to wipe that tingling feeling free. In seconds, it had faded and he sat there, itching his finger.

Sweat streamed down his face, pooled under his eyes.

It’s not over and you know it’s not over. Don’t be so fucking naïve.

“Stop it,” he said, breathing very fast. “Just… stop it.”

He had to conquer this before it conquered him. He knew fear. He understood fear. He had faced it down again and again. This was no different. He just had to get a handle on it. He forced himself to regulate his breathing before he began to hyperventilate. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Each time he slowed his respiration until it returned to normal. He kept his eyes shut while he did it. He knew if he saw something, something that shouldn’t be there, that he would panic anew.

Finally, he opened his eyes.

This was so weird, so… uncanny—he hadn’t wanted to use that word because it was one they always used in ghost story books when he was a kid. Things were always uncanny or eerie or unexpected. If he was really being haunted, then bring on the spooks and specters, the flapping shrouds and clanking chains and moaning voices. That was physical, more or less, and he could have wrapped his brain around something like that. This was just too subtle, too… eerie, too personal, if that made any sense.

You are being haunted, Charlie, and you know it. Whatever is here is toying with you. You won’t see any of that B-movie, gothic stuff because that was just shit invented by Victorian writers who were trying to put a face on the supernatural, trying to channel their own fears into recognizable imagery for the masses, hence the graveyards and white sheets and chains and creaking doors and locked rooms and moaning voices at midnight. Their real fears would have made no sense on paper, anymore than yours would. Haunting, real haunting, is a private thing, an intimate thing staged in your own head.

Scratching absently at his finger, he nodded. “Yeah,” he whispered. “That’s it exactly.”

He lit a cigarette, staring at his finger which was red and hurting now. Hell was going on with it? Rat-bite fever or something? He drew off his cigarette, blowing out clouds of smoke that he automatically formed into smoke rings.

Though he tried to fight against it, a black dread settled in his belly. He could almost feel it putting out cold roots that ran up into his chest.

Here it comes again.

Whatever was going to happen, it was beginning now.

It was like cold fingers at the back of his neck again.

It was insane, perfectly insane, but he felt like he was being watched. Stared at by huge, seeking eyes. He felt oddly as if he were sitting up on a stage with a huge audience in attendance. Silently, they stared at him, waiting to see what he did next. Because when they knew what he was going to do, then… well, then they’d know what they were going to do. He tried to tell himself that what he was feeling just might be hidden cameras that Arturo had placed in the walls but he didn’t believe it.

It wasn’t a camera or even a series of them. Cameras were machines. They were neutral, benign. What was watching him was sentient, it was malignant. It had a million eyes.

“Stop it,” he said, scraping his finger against the frame of the bed frantically as if he wanted to peel the skin free.

The sound of his own voice was disconcerting as it echoed out into the empty room. It seemed to bounce around too much before it died like maybe it wasn’t his voice at all, but something else mocking him again. He licked his lips, refusing to give into this nonsense, and said, “What a scene.”

His voice bounced away. When it should have died out, it continued to echo, but shrill and tinny like an old recording.

Just a trick of the acoustics, that’s all it was. What else could it possibly be?

He chuckled in his throat, thinking about those people in horror movies that were always doing the stupidest things. Going down into empty cellars when they heard noises and poking around in attics when they heard footsteps. You’d see them do that shit and roll your eyes and say to yourself, man, I’d never do that! But would you? That’s what Charlie kept asking himself.

The room was getting to him, it was working at his nerves and electrifying his imagination. He was scared and he did not know why. If it had been some dumb horror movie, he would have been the first to tell himself to get out. But he didn’t. And he knew why he didn’t just like those people in those movies didn’t: they couldn’t let themselves. They couldn’t allow themselves to give in to imagination or instinct or any of that; they were reasoning, intelligent creatures and they refused to be frightened, refused to become superstitious natives, gourd-rattling peasants.

Besides, they weren’t like him, they didn’t have balls, they weren’t drop-forged from iron, they weren’t—

Oh, Jesus Christ in Heaven, what’s happening to me?

The room was suddenly just the room again. Floors were even and walls held the ceiling in place. The door was squared off and all was as it should have been. Charlie stood up, the bed feeling too soft beneath him like it wanted to suck him down to the center of the earth.

He pulled out another cigarette, shaking his head.

Funny what your mind could do to you.

Arturo had gotten the bed made up with fresh sheets and all that, but the rest of the room was dirty and dusty, cobwebs up in the corners. It needed a good airing, that’s what. He touched the desktop, the arm of the sofa, then a framed photograph of a freighter being loaded and a thick patina of dust came off under his fingertips. He went over to the porthole and opened it, letting some salt air in. It did little to disturb the heavy, mildewed smell of rotting upholstery that reminded him of linens and drapes stored in old trunks… or of shrouds lying yellow and damp in buried caskets.

He took a drag off his cigarette and got nothing.

He had forgotten to light it.

In the glow of the lantern, he could see specks of dust churning madly like atoms. He heard a scratching sound and turned. It had been right behind him, at the wall or near it… but he saw nothing, nothing at all. Grabbing the lantern, he went over there. The wall was covered in heavy wallpaper threaded with roses and floral displays. Stems and branches and reaching rootlets. A woman’s touch, definitely a woman’s touch. The touch of Virginia. The longer he looked at the pattern, the more it seemed to twine together, to move and crawl. He pressed his fingertips against it, squinting his eyes so it would quit wavering and growing and right away, he yanked his hand away.

God, it moved. The wallpaper was moving. No, no, no, not moving exactly but rising and falling like it was breathing.

Things began to lose focus around him. The room spun and he went to his knees, gasping for breath. He squeezed his eyes shut because he knew he was going to see things and he did not want to see them. He couldn’t bear to see them because this time he really would go insane.

Yet, his eyes did open and the funny/strange/disturbing thing was that it did not seem to be of his own volition. His eyelids were like window shades drawn upwards by an intrusive hand.

The room had changed and the first thing he saw was blood.

Red, glistening, Technicolor blood patterns pooled on the floor and splattered up the wall. He grew pale at the sight of it because he knew it was Virginia’s blood. Heslip and those other animals had beaten her to death for crimes they dared not speak aloud because the very idea was terrifying.

In fact, there she was, broken and battered and almost shapeless, curled up on the floor looking like a dropped marionette. Heslip was there looking down at her. Two other sailors were with him. One of them was named Stilson and the other was called Cubby. Charlie could not see Heslip’s face—something he was glad of—but he could see the other two. What held his attention were their eyes which were very wide, very bright, and very shiny with fear.

“This is bad,” Heslip said. “We gotta put her over the side, then swab up this mess.”

Cubby looked like he was having trouble swallowing the spit in his mouth and Stilson just slowly shook his head. “I… uh… I don’t think I can. I don’t think I could touch her,” he admitted. “That blood… Jesus, all that blood… I can almost taste it in my mouth.”

“Straighten up, you idiot,” Heslip said.

He watched Cubby and Stilson bring in an old gray tarp. Looking sick and pale, they wrapped Virginia’s body in it. Charlie watched them drag it out into the passage. The next thing he saw was Heslip and the others standing in front of a cabin door. Even though they were all pretty much the same, Charlie knew it was the same door that had cracked him in the head.

“In here,” Cubby said. “This is where it hides.”

“Yeah,” another said. “She left food outside the door for it. She left meat… it ate everything but the bones.”

And Charlie knew as all the sailors standing there knew that this cabin was kept locked all the time and only Virginia had a key. This is where she hid her horror. Heslip shouldered the others out of the way. He tried the door latch and they nearly fell over each other getting clear.

He examined the padlock on it. “If it’s in there, then it can’t get out.”

“But it does get out,” Stilson said. “You saw what it did to Jim.”

Heslip nodded, wondering what exactly was behind that locked door, what sort of thing could escape a locked room. It made no sense.

He held his hand out. “Okay. Let me have it.”

Trembling, Stilson dropped the key he had taken from the captain’s cabin into the 2^nd Mate’s hand. Heslip eyed it cautiously. “Get ready,” he said as he slipped the key into the padlock.

The others were holding an odd assortment of weapons—pipe wrenches, gaffs, lengths of lead pipe. Heslip had a knife. As the lock dropped to the floor, he took it out. The blade was six inches long, gleaming and deadly and Charlie wondered how many bellies he had shoved it into.

Heslip pressed an ear to the door. “Quiet,” he said.

He grasped the latch, turned it, and pushed the door open. It swung in noiselessly. It was black in there and Heslip wrinkled his nose at the stink that came out. Charlie couldn’t smell it, but he could see the floor in there. There was dirty straw all over the place like in a hog’s pen, what might have been scraps of rags and well-gnawed bones cast about. The stench must have been hot and noisome to inspire the sort of disgust he saw on Heslip’s face.

“It stinks like old urine,” Charlie heard his own voice say. “Like pig piss, shit, and animal remains.”

In a shaft of light from the corridor, he could see a box leaning against the far wall.

The box, the box, there’s the box.

It was about the size of a child’s coffin, maybe four feet high, but it was no coffin, just a wooden packing crate. A nice dark little den to crawl into when the day brightened. The lid leaned up next to it.

Heslip, very cautiously, reached around for the light switch only to find there was none to be had.

“All right,” he said. “Hand me that flashlight.”

It was handed to him. The muscles at his jaw and throat tensed, strung tight like cables under the skin. The flashlight in one hand and the knife in the other, he stepped into the room cautiously. One step, two, then a hesitant third like a man traipsing through a minefield. He cast the beam of light about and saw nothing, yet he was certain something was alive and waiting in there. He could smell its hot animal stink and hear its ragged breathing and that made sweat roll down his face like runnels of hot wax down a candle stem. That’s when he saw an eye staring at him. Not two eyes, just the one: a single huge translucent eye like that of an owl peering down from a craggy graveyard tree. It was the greenish hue of diseased flesh. He gasped, swinging the light in its direction but never making it. Something hit him like a projectile and the flashlight went spinning to the floor.

The others pulled back because Heslip’s blood sprayed into their faces. It gushed, it fountained. Two of them ran off. Cubby and Stilson stayed, but only because they were nearly paralyzed with terror. They dropped to their knees, goggle-eyed, tongues dangling from their mouths like rubber worms. They were both shrieking, pawing blood from their faces.

Meanwhile, old tough guy, terror-of-the-docks Heslip died. Whatever was in there hit him again and again like a shark in a sea of blood. Charlie could not see what it was, not exactly. He only knew it was shaggy and fast and had claws like threshing blades. Heslip barely put up a defense. Maybe if he’d had the knife, but it was still clenched in his hand and his hand was on the floor, severed at the wrist.

He fell halfway out the door, his head bouncing off the floor. His face was a mass of blood, his eyes dangling from their sockets by what looked like strings of red licorice, and his lower jaw was missing. As Stilson and Cubby pressed themselves up against the opposite bulkhead, they saw a scaly, bristled hand grab Heslip by the belt and drag him into the darkness. Then the cabin door slammed shut. And this is what Charlie saw for several minutes: just the door with droplets of blood running down its surface.